The very word ˝meme¨ derives from the Greek word mimēma, which means ˝that which is imitated˝.
In today’s era, it is about visual content that has a large reach, quickly achieves virality and is becoming more and more interesting to marketing experts.
As the original meaning of the word itself indicates – it is mostly about repetitive visual content with the text changed, but this does not always have to be the case. Some brands create original humorous content in the form of images, GIFs or videos.
Is using meme marketing a good option for your brand? Depends.
The 2022 Wavemaker report claims that 30% of people aged 13-35 send memes to their friends and loved ones on a daily basis, so if you’re targeting millennials and Gen Z, we definitely suggest you consider this newer form of marketing. On the other hand, if your buyer persona is an older, serious and business person, it would be better to turn to some other marketing strategies.
Considering that millennials and Gen Z make up 40% of the consumer audience, we think it’s worth considering this way of spreading viral content and therefore awareness of your brand. Memes are cheap, effective and tend to spread rapidly on social networks and achieve high engagement, which is an excellent strategy for small and large advertisers.
Many famous brands like Netflix, Penguin Random House and Gucci have resorted to this type of marketing and achieved great results. This marketing strategy uses humorous content keeping in mind the goals it wants to achieve, which can vary from simply spreading brand awareness to achieving conversions.
The content of the memes themselves can vary from informative to extremely funny in order to give a touch of lightness to the overall marketing strategy and the brand itself. This form of marketing is ideal for reaching an audience that is harder to reach with other strategies such as classic ads with a direct CTA, many of whom are already saturated and simply ignore it. Meme marketing, on the other hand, has the possibility of achieving closeness with the brand on a more intimate level, which can be helpful when promoting your products and/or services.
2023 Omnicore study shows that 80% of people will prefer to watch video content, and only 20% will read the text on the page, which highlights the importance of visual storytelling on social networks, but not exclusively there. You can incorporate memes into your blog posts, email marketing, etc. However, they spread the fastest on social networks.
If you decide on meme marketing as part of your marketing strategy, it is important that you clearly define two things: the ˝voice˝ of your brand and the buyer persona, the ideal consumer/user to whom you are addressing through shared content. The content should be simple and precisely targeted to the target group. It is important that the text is large and clearly legible, you can freely use existing visuals to which you will add your original text, and it is possible to subtly insert some kind of CTA.
What is not surprising is that memes often turn out to be more relevant content that users engage with more than the original content. The already mentioned 2022 Wavemaker report claims that the average millennial comes across 20 to 30 memes a day and is happy to share them with their friends and followers on social networks.
Another study, 2022 Aura&Elma shows that meme marketing has a 14% higher CTR than email marketing, making it one of the most effective tools for achieving high ROI.
However, this form of marketing has some disadvantages, although it is cheap, it will achieve good user engagement and it is easy to create. Its disadvantages are that it is short-lived, requires detailed research of your audience in order to successfully reach them, and there is always the possibility that some users will find the content offensive.
Although appealing, think carefully before committing to meme marketing and ask yourself if its tone matches your brand’s voice and reputation.
